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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23289979">Visionary</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdelaCathcart/pseuds/AdelaCathcart'>AdelaCathcart</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Age Difference, Canon Compliant, F/M, Hallucinations, Rough Sex, Semen-Stealing Witches</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 11:02:17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,608</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23289979</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdelaCathcart/pseuds/AdelaCathcart</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A witch lives fully in her body: she knows intimately the divine kiss of starlight and the ineffable song of the aurora, has congress with ghosts, with devils, with the dead; she thinks little and feels much. Lord Asriel’s existence is to her as limited and brief as a mayfly’s. He can never understand her. But what she craves now is the love of a mortal man, and this he can gladly provide.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Lord Asriel/Ruta Skadi</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Visionary</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Ruta Skadi skipped over this part when she described her encounter with Lord Asriel during <i>The Subtle Knife</i>, so I decided to go ahead and fill it in.</p><p>“Body, all body, to hell with the soul.” —Angela Carter, <i>The Passion of New Eve</i></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">Lord Asriel sleeps very little.</p><p class="p1">He’s gained and lost fortunes, killed and been sentenced to death, sacrificed families, torn reality apart. An intricate empire has taken shape from the seed of his ever-churning mind. He lives at its center in a state of perfect mastery, helming an unstoppable craft whose every cog was forged in his own powerful hands. He commands outlandish armies, his generals are kings and queens, his cavalry of angels numbers in the millions, his arms forges are the size of cities, his war is the one and only war—the war for the freedom of all worlds.</p><p class="p1">He’s nearing fifty, but in the witch’s arms he feels like a child.</p><p class="p1">She despises weakness, and he shows none when she reveals herself in his chamber. Stelmaria sensed something uncanny as they were leaving the small washroom and so he’s on his guard, and when a soft, thick shadow comes unstuck from the dark-paneled wall and moves towards him the instinct of his weary muscles outpaces his lagging reason. He lunges for the throat but the familiar, voluptuous form of a woman lands heavily in his outstretched arms, kissing him savagely as her daredevil bluethroat dæmon darts between the leopard’s razor claws.</p><p class="p1">With a hand in her dense curls Asriel yanks his assailant’s head firmly back, and looks into the fierce beautiful face of the witch queen.</p><p class="p1">“Queen Ruta Skadi,” he greets her, laughing with exhilaration as the fire in her dark eyes transmutes his heart’s racing from fear to desire. The exhaustion in his limbs dissolves in an instant, and with adrenaline suffusing his blood he wrestles her to his rustic camp bed. “Did you come here to kill me?”</p><p class="p1">“If I had you would be dead already,” she says with relish.</p><p class="p1">A witch lives fully in her body: she knows intimately the divine kiss of starlight and the ineffable song of the aurora, has congress with ghosts, with devils, with the dead, she thinks little and feels much. Lord Asriel’s existence is to her as limited and brief as a mayfly’s. He can never understand her. But what she craves now is the love of a mortal man, and this he can gladly provide.</p><p class="p1">She attacks him again with her wide wet mouth, kissing like no one ever taught her how, like she invented the heathen practice by herself. An athletic twist of her body, swift as a viper’s strike, and he finds himself pinned lusciously beneath her, with her full breasts overflowing in his hands. The smell of her body is rich and otherworldly, blood and pinewood smoke, and a wild ozone taste like a thunderhead. She scrapes her teeth harshly up his throat, digging them into his jaw and cheekbone, uttering wild animal wails a human woman would know to suppress. At least when his men hear her cries they’ll be warned not to come in. Either that, or they’ll think he’s being murdered.</p><p class="p1">Sergi, the bluethroat, dances merrily just beyond Stelmaria’s reach, and the leopard stalks him around the room, crouching, her head low to the ground, pupils dilated with pleasure as she waits for a false move. In a flash she snatches at him with a white paw like a badminton racket, but he swoops under her strike and she clips the table instead. A small landslide of notebooks cascades to the floor. She scrambles over them, springing lightly off the upturned table’s side and leaping high for another swat at the songbird. Briefly, he allows himself to be caught, and Stelmaria drags her prey into a rosewood armchair, which topples backwards at the impact and the bluethroat flutters free. The leopard rolls to her feet, and her heavy tail lashes from side to side, whacking an empty wine glass which shatters against the wall.</p><p class="p1">With two hands Ruta Skadi tears Asriel’s fine nightshirt apart, rending it from neckline to hem as if it were a mere cobweb to reveal the thing which she would have from him. His already-painful erection strains urgently towards her as if seeking her admiration, and she smiles down approvingly but doesn’t touch it yet. Instead she gropes his testicles a little roughly, for no doubt she has designs on his seed, and a pang of grief at the thought of another fatherless child is shaken off with the alacrity of habit. If she wants that from him he can’t prevent it. Her basilisk eye has him stiff as stone, and will keep him so until she’s had her fill.</p><p class="p1">“Love me,” the witch queen orders, deftly unbinding the black silk rags she wears like regalia. “If you please me, I shall rally my clan to your cause.”</p><p class="p1">No man could refuse her and live with himself. No man could refuse her and live.</p><p class="p1">The camp bed is too fragile for the sort of loving they will do, so he takes her on the bearskin rug instead. She straddles his lap and they fuck upright, face-to-face. The witch queen’s intense vitality surrounds her like an aura, and Asriel can feel it almost crackling around them as her unnatural senses permeate his consciousness through their coupling. He smells her strange arousal in the air, hears her thick eyelashes beating loud as raptors’ wings; his eyesight’s as sharp and his cock as rampant as when he was a teenager. He tips her back in his arms to devour her plum-ripe nipples and her skin is sweet as beeswax, her flesh is soft and gorgeous in his hands, and he can't remember when he last touched something soft, or tasted something sweet.</p><p class="p1">Laying her down on the fur, he slings her long legs up over his shoulders, penetrating her as deeply as their bodies will allow. She shrieks with unearthly pleasure and when he goes to kiss her she bites him hard enough to bleed, and licks the wound with a grin. Groaning in pain, he pulls her away by the hair, rutting into her furiously, and Sergi opens his little throat and sings.</p><p class="p1">It’s impossible to say where her orgasms end or begin: for her the act seems to be one of continuous ecstasy that swells and ebbs, with varying textures and densities like a bank of cloud. Her whole vast skin is awake to the sensations of pleasure. Her cunt is alive: it sucks him with an unnatural dexterity that could be frightening, but the strange and unlikely delights him; he feels all the more in his element in the embrace of the unknown. She allows his own pleasure to mount in the usual linear fashion until with an inhuman skill she freezes him at the precipice.</p><p class="p1">He might beg her for relief if he were the sort of man to beg, but he knows she isn’t here for his submission. She slipped into the heart of greatest fortress ever built by man, and damned if he can guess how she did it, and what she sought there was to offer herself to him. He must only prove he’s worthy to command her.</p><p class="p1">He throws one of her ankles over his head, forcing her onto her side, and spoons her for a few lazy strokes to catch his breath before lifting her hips to mount her from behind. With one hand in her hair and the other reaching around to squeeze her breasts, he uses the force of his weight to grind her on her knees and shoulders against the thick bearskin. Then he pulls her up and bites her hard where her nape meets her shoulder and doesn’t let go, just holding her in place like that and grunting ferociously through his bared teeth, and she must be pleased because she sits up and fucks him back even harder. Her cunt squeezes deliberately down the length of him, the way a farmer milks a cow, and sucks him dry.</p><p class="p1">With a sensation like fainting he feels himself sink through her body, unbearably hot where their organs overlap, falling through the floor and through the tower and headlong into a great chasm, bathed in golden light, and with a throb of terrible pain his skull cracks open, and the world goes black. When he recovers himself the room is spinning, he’s on his back and she’s having <em>his</em> orgasm, his sensations are echoing through her, everything is upside-down, and all he can do is keep fucking until she’s done.</p><p class="p1">Then he finds they’re upright, astride one another as they were when they began, sticky with sweat and laughing. He grabs her face in his hands and kisses her joyfully, and she allows this affectionate gesture with a bemusement that almost makes him bashful. Love is ebbing: now the witch queen wants to parley.</p><p class="p1">He gets up to retrieve a flask of wine from his cabinet. The glasses are in pieces on the floor, so they sit naked in the glow of the smoldering brazier and drink together straight from the bottle.</p><p class="p1">“What are the strange forces gathered here, Lord Asriel, and for what purpose?” she wants to know, gulping ’til the wine runs down her chin. “My clan has heard whispers that you intend to challenge the Authority himself. Is this true?”</p><p class="p1">"Do they speak of it in Siberia, then?" he laughs.</p><p class="p1">After she leaves, he will be heartsick. His sleep will be deep and dreamless, his waking nauseated and morose. But while she’s here the spell remains unbroken: he glows with her borrowed vitality, temporarily invincible. She can't stay, and he wouldn't want her to, but for now he's glad of the witch queen's company.</p><p class="p1">He will talk for as long as she will listen.</p>
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